Author's Note: Can I just say once more, icanhearthedrums and CaptainHooksGirl, that you both make my day? I think you both are solely responsible for my very very uncharacteristic daily updates. :) So this one's for you!
When summer winds down, Christine falls sick.
Deathly sick, Erik realizes, when he comes home after a long day of work only to find the young woman nearly unconscious on the floor. Her skin burns like the pavement does on an afternoon in mid-July, and when he begs her to speak for him, slurred words roll off a strawberry-red tongue. He presses his fingers against the column of her throat and trails them down to her collar, pulling apart the fabric of her dress to reveal the tops of her breasts. He feels wicked only until the rash across her chest confirms his suspicions, at which point a sense of quiet determination overtakes him.
He slips his hand around her slim waist and gathers her in his arms, wishing that such contact could be under better circumstances. She weighs close to nothing, and the feeling of her cheek against his shoulder, he thinks, is perhaps the sweetest sensation he has ever known. She mumbles against his breast pocket, and her eyes flutter open, bloodshot and heavy-lidded.
He lays her down on her bed, and pushes a few tendrils of hair off her damp forehead. For a moment, he disappears, and returns with a tiny glass vial and a syringe.
Scarlet fever is a wild creature, he muses, as he draws the clear serum into the barrel, but it is not one that he cannot tame.
Clothing, however, proves to be a problem. She is wearing far too much of it and Erik is wholly unaccustomed to the notion of undressing a woman. He knows he must act quickly, but still his hands hesitate above her clothing, not wanting to rob her of her modesty. In the end, he locates a loose seam on her dress, and pinching the sides, rips a small stretch of it open. Christine whimpers when he slides the needle into the skin of her belly, and he apologizes profusely for the pain he is causing her, inwardly wishing that he could bear it himself, at a hundred or thousand fold!
When at last a compress rests on her forehead, and a mug of tea steams on her bedside, and the blankets are adjusted on top of her, and a pillow props up her aching neck, he begins to take his leave. The chair creaks despite his efforts to move without waking her, and her eyes flutter open once again, exhausted but alert.
Stay with me, she whispers, patting the empty space beside her.
She is the one with the fever, and yet he is the one who sweats and shivers. Slowly, he shrugs off his overcoat, not wanting to overwhelm her with the musky odors that his long day of work has left behind. After that come his shoes, crusted with mud and torn blades of grass. Then, Erik slips into bed beside her. He prays that she doesn't notice the way she makes his heart beat twenty times quicker, or the ragged breaths she draws from his chest, or sounds of anxious churning deep within his belly.
She doesn't. Instead, she finds a place against his body to rest her weary head, and falls fast asleep.
That marks the first of many nights the pair share a bed, and the last they ever spend apart.
* I actually had to take a detour from the Civil War research and check out the more scientific side of the internet for this chapter. In case any of you are history lovers like me and are wondering, the common treatment in the 19th century for Scarlet Fever was blood-letting, where physicians would bleed a patient under the assumption that the illness (and not just Scarlet Fever, but other illnesses with similar symptoms) was due to an imbalance in the blood. Needless to say, not very many people bounced back from their illnesses after having been treated that way. However, in November of 1900, a serum made from horse blood was developed and successfully treated patients infected with Scarlet Fever. I figure that it is not unreasonable for Erik, being the genius that he is, to have come to similar conclusions regarding this horse blood serum a few decades earlier during his travels, which we shall learn more about soon enough! :)